Landscape and Literature introduces students to the exploration of different ways in which landscape has been represented in literature. It focuses on key aspects of this topic such as the importance of pastoral, contrasts between city and country, eighteenth-century developments from neo-classical to picturesque and Romantic ideas of the sublime, regional novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and varied styles of twentieth-century poetry from the Georgian poets to Heaney and Hughes. Poems and prose extracts from writers such as Marvell, Wordsworth, George Eliot, Hardy, Lawrence and Seamus Heaney are included.

Each title includes a wide-ranging yet carefully levelled introductory discussion of a literary period, genre or theme, to provide students with an excellent introduction to an area of literature.

Helps students to address the new assessment objective 4 ('demonstrate understanding of the significance and influence of the contexts in which literary texts are written and received') - worth up to 35% of the A level qualification under new guidelines.

Discussion questions and end-of-section tasks offer an invaluable resource for self study as well as helpful exam preparation.

A mini-anthology of texts and extracts saves teachers time searching for appropriate 'wider reading' texts.

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Approaching landscape and literature: Classical influences

Biblical influences: Eden and expulsion

The garden of love

The greenwood

Elegant shepherds

Symbolic nature

The eighteenth century: the Enlightenment

Towards the Romantics

Confinement and space

Assignments

2. Approaching the texts: Chaucer's landscapes

Shakespeare's landscapes

Marvell's ingenuity

Landscapes for elegy

Landscapes for religion

The country house

Romantic solitude

Landscapes of childhood

The Romantics: the Sublime and the Gothic

Hardy's Wessex

Observation and beyond

Working the land

Desolated land

Ancient and modern

Assignments

3. Texts and extracts: Simon Armitage, from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight